Here’s why you shouldn’t use the same policies for different cities and states

The panic around COVID-19 caused the people and most governments of the United States to chuck common sense in order to listen to “the experts.” The experts that were crazy wrong about most things with this pandemic. The numbers below from an article on Bloomberg.com show how stupid it is to treat places like Kentucky, Idaho, and Kansas like New York City. Heck even the rest of the State of New York didn’t have to be treated like New York City.

I’m in the Chicago area and it is stupid to treat the rest of the state like the Chicago metropolitan area. A majority of the cases in the State of Illinois are all in Cook County and the collar counties surrounding Chicago.

We reached #PeakStupid in this country.

There is no question that New York State has borne the brunt of the crisis. The Times reports that one out of every three Americans who has died from Covid-19 has been a New Yorker — 17,000 in all. New York City is one of the few places in the country — along with Detroit and New Orleans — where the hospital system has been stretched to capacity. (Although even in New York City, the most catastrophic expectations never came to pass: for instance, the Naval hospital ship Comfort, which came to New York to provide emergency beds, is being returned after treating just 179 patients.)

New York is the densest city in the country, and density is a crucial factor in spreading the virus. Yet cities and states that are far less dense have imposed the same restrictions as New York State. Idaho has a stay-at-home order; it has had 172 hospitalizations and 58 deaths as of Tuesday. 1 Kansas: 504 hospitalizations and 124 deaths. Maine: 163 hospitalizations and 51 deaths. Meanwhile, Governor Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas never instituted a shelter-at-home order — yet the state has only 104 current hospitalizations and 52 deaths. Which suggests an obvious question: Does it make sense for these less dense places to be imposing the same restrictions as New York?